"It's not even just that he's a high profile person, it's just absolutely terrible when families are torn apart in such tragic circumstances," said Superintendent Des Bray, not long after dawn on this most grim of days.

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"For any family, regardless of who it is, [this is] one of the worst things you could imagine that could happen to you."

Tributes to the late Adelaide coach outside AAMI stadium.Credit:Getty Images

The numbness and shock now runs deeper even than at the passing of cricketer Phil Hughes last November. His family at least had the straw of consolation that he died doing what he loved.

The football world comprises families within families. The family of clubs knew and cherished Walsh, so much that last year he was able to cross the Torrens from Port Adelaide to the Crows without losing a friend, a feat akin to walking on water.

But the wider football family barely knew him.

Only after when taking on the Crows coaching job did he begin to emerge from the wings where had dwelled - industriously, productively and happily - since his playing days ended a quarter of a century previously.

Adelaide coach Phil Walsh and his son Cy.

His nuclear family was deeper in the shadows still.

At the breaking of Friday's ghastly news, not everyone involved in football in Adelaide could immediately remember the names of his wife, son and daughter.

James Podsiadly (centre) leaves the Crows club rooms.Credit:Getty Images

Upon his appointment by the Crows, Walsh had invoked his children.

"I tell my kids to chase their dreams, so I probably don't want to look back at 70 years old and think what might have been," he said. "So here I am."

But suddenly, shockingly, he isn't here, and never will be again, and all those dreams have become one gruesome nightmare, and the football family is stunned, and the club family weeps, and his own family is exposed in all its grief and torment and incomprehension, and all that happens and doesn't happen now must have that inestimable trauma as its starting point.

"We are all flesh and blood," said Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley, framing his tribute.

It is simple truth that we choose to overlook because football is built around the myth of indestructibility, though every other day gives further lie to it.

The delicacy of mental health has been high on the AFL agenda all season, and now the issue veritably pulses there, more graphically than anyone could have imagined.

A tribute to the Crows late head coach Phil Walsh at AAMI Stadium.Credit:Getty

In recent interviews in which Walsh had begun to colour in his previously sketchy outline, the toll of his double life in many families emerged, poignantly.

He spoke of his inability to leave the game at work, and his work at the club, and how it had driven a wedge between himself and his son, and how he regretted this, and of his recent efforts to mend the rent, including a family day of surfing - on which he consciously banished football from his thoughts - and how reconciliation was a work in progress.

"I remember one year I snapped at my son over something and he said: 'Footy's started again has it, Dad?'," Walsh said.

"That really rocked me. So I'm working on it." Now it is work that will never be finished.

Sensibly, the AFL cancelled Sunday's Adelaide-Geelong match. There was a train of thought that it should have gone ahead, as a tribute and because Walsh would have wanted it. But it is impossible to imagine how the Crows could have willed themselves into a frame of mind to play as soon as Sunday.

Personally, I can't imagine how any AFL footballer could work himself up to the competitive pitch necessary to play the game on any day this weekend with the image of Walsh somewhere in their subconscious. But I'm just one voice in a football family cacaphony.

Football as family is a cliche, but on a day like this it rings true.

The football family is made up of many disparate people in many farflung places who have only one bond, but it runs as deep as blood, and who on Friday laid wreaths at the club and lowered flags around the country to half-mast and draped scarves on fences and around goalposts and gathered in cyberspace for a giant group hug and didn't want to let go.

All families have their stars and their secrets, their joys and their regrets, and some, sadly, their tragedies.